By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

In Lexical Strata in English, Heinz Giegerich investigates the way in whichalternations in the sound patterns of words interact with the morphologicalprocesses of the language. Drawing examples from English and German, heuncovers and spells out in detail the principles of 'lexical morphology andphonology', a theory that has in recent years become increasinglyinfluential in linguistics. Giegerich queries many of the assumptions madein that theory, overturning some and putting others on a principledfooting. What emerges is a new, formally coherent and highly constrainedtheory of the lexicon - the theory of 'base-driven' stratification - whichpredicts the number of lexical strata from the number of base-categorydistinctions recognized in the morphology of the language. Finally, heoffers new accounts of some central phenomena in the phonology of English(including vowel 'reduction', [r]-sandhi and syllabification), which bothsupport and are uniquely facilitated by this new theory.